Program in Comparative Literature The University of Texas at Austin Comparative Literature The university of texas at austin
Comparative Literature Newsletter Spring 2012 Letter from the Director Eric Hobsbawm invented the idea of the long Letter from the Director 1 19th century and invited us to see what precedes and follows as constitutive of any given historical Program News and cultural moment. In his terms, we are now Incoming Graduate Students 2 living at the end of the long 20th century, and the Note from GRACLS 2 UT Program in Comparative Literature has taken Fall 2012 Courses 3 this year (which does not end with two zeros) as a moment for reflection. Beginning with the Student News and Profiles theme of our fall 2011 symposium, “Reflections: Degree Recipients 4 Identity after Crisis,” much of our work this year has centered on examining the events and the Elizabeth Fernea Fellowship 4 ideas that prompt our comparative work. At Prizes and Fellowships 5 the same time we have embraced the task of Alumni News 5 imagining the future role that the humanities First Year Student Profiles 6 and international studies must play within our 2011 GRACLS Conference 7 academy and in our communities beyond. Student Profiles Pearl Brilmyer 8 With student and faculty colleagues energetically Michal Raizen 9 pursuing research in Germany, Spain, Egypt, Heather Latiolais Eure 10 Israel, Taiwan, Cuba, Chile, Argentina, Russia
Andrew Bennett 10 and beyond, our program continues to explore Marina Flider 11 how a transnational, multilingual and planetary Katya Cotey 12 approach to the study of human expression both reflects who we are and projects who we
may become. Whether closely reading Sanskrit Faculty News 13-14 poetry or assessing the role of social media in ACLA 15-16 the Arab Spring, whether redefining gender in News in Brief 16-19 West Africa or seeking the origins of the very 2011 Proseminar 20 idea of gender in Europe, the members of our 2012 GRACLS Conference CFP 21 community demonstrate how attention to Job Placement News 22 language and culture allow us to understand moments of transformation and their aftermaths. I hope that you will enjoy the reflections in the pages that follow of (and on) the past year. Elizabeth Richmond-Garza Program News
Incoming Graduate Students A Note from GRACLS by César A. Salgado, Graduate Advisor by Dusty Hixenbaugh
Global diversity in national and academic backgrounds and study in three This past year, with the unfailing support of our faculty, or more national languages are only two of the many distinguishing quali- we GRAduate Comparative Literature Students (that is, ties of the CL 2012-2013 incoming class. GRACLS) have soared. Let’s measure the height at which we’ve flown by the depth of our involvement. Many Jennifer “Jamila” Davey joins us after finishing a MA in UT Austin’s Dept. thank-yous are in order. of Middle Eastern Studies. With a BA in Philosophy from Northwestern University, she studies modern Arabic literature, music and cinema “as Thank you, first and foremost, to everyone who turned domains of Islamic expression [with] the project of theorizing postmodern out for our eighth annual conference. Neither our Islamic identity” while focusing on gender issues and female voices. Having “Reflections” on crisis nor our keynote from Dr. Idelber done work in Spanish, she plans to start on French under our program. Avelar would have been possible without your papers Before coming to Austin, she lived in Albuquerque, where she worked in and attendance. Thank you most of all to Jonathan Fleck, radio, founded an Arabic Language Club, and organized the 2005 New Katie Logan, and our graduate coordinator Billy Fatzinger Mexico Middle East Film Festival. for helping Roanne Sharp and me put the pieces togeth- er, and to Katie (again) and Martino Lovato for planning Yucong Hao will be joining us from Beijing with a BA in English from our follow-up. I hope you’ll all join us, and our speaker, Dr. Tsinghua University and Japanese as her third language. She wishes to Jahan Ramazani, for “Go-Betweens: Crossing Borders.” explore how non-Western modernisms “participate in the ‘global’ conver- I am particularly proud to reflect on the number of times sation” through the comparison of Chinese and English/Irish cases that we GRACLS have met as professionals this year, at our include Beijing’s experimental jingpai writers and the New Confucians’ conference as well as in our workshop and roundtable se- negotiations with Western influences. At Tsinghua U. she founded the in- ries, and the exceptional collaboration between students stitution’s first book club and was the editor-in-chief of a literary magazine. and faculty. Thank you to Roanne and Dr. Wojciehowski for their workshop on the Ph.D. Qualifying Exam and A native of Croatia, Nika Setek holds a BA in Communications and Spanish theory, and to Somy Kim, Jayita Sinha, and our exiting and an MA in Spanish from Saint Louis U, with coursework in German, president, Frank Strong, for their advice for preparing for Latin, Italian, and French. She has several years of experience in innovative the Comprehensive Exam. Thank you also to everyone high school and college Spanish instruction at St. Louis. Her special areas who volunteered their expertise as discussants at our of interest are comparative medieval studies and contemporary dystopian theory roundtables, including Katie (she’s everywhere), literatures. Dr. Richmond-Garza, and Irina Simova for Plato; John DeStafney and Dr. El-Ariss for Kant; and Nandini Dhar, Massachusetts resident Kaitlin Shirley received her BA in literature at Simone Sessolo, and Dr. Wilks for Engels and Marx. We Sarah Lawrence College in 2008; she has worked since as an editor and can’t wait to schedule more workshops and roundtables research assistant. During her junior year abroad at Paris Sorbonne a semi- this fall. nar on “Dostoevsky and Parricide” reaffirmed her enthusiasm for the author of “Notes from Underground”; she started learning Russian at Middlebury Thank you to Frank and (Saint) Billy for shepherding us College soon after. At UT she will explore confession, transgression, and onto the Internet (and into the 21st century). For the first translation matters in 19th-century French, English, and Russian writing time, this year we are connected on Facebook and on with Dostoevsky as a comparative focus. Comparative Literature’s website. Anthony Arroyo, we’re still awaiting your biography. With work on continental philosophy and a BA in CL from the University of Washington, Jennie Wojtusik plans to study 18th and 19th-century Lastly, thank you to Marina Flider and Thammika Russian and modern German and English literatures “across a spectrum of Songkaeo, our former and present social chairs, respec- schools of thought such as European nihilism, Romanticism, existentialism, tively, for bringing us all together for frozen yogurt, beers humanism, and phenomenology.” Before her work in CL, Jennie studied and cheese, and far more cart food than anybody should music and Eastern theology. consume in just one afternoon.
Raelene Wyse has a BA in English from Seattle U. and an MA in Latin 2012 - 2013 GRACLS Officers American and Caribbean Studies from New York U. She plans to work on Spanish, Portuguese, and Hebrew literatures at UT with a focus on gender/ President: Dusty Hixenbaugh power issues among Chilean and Brazilian Jewish women writers. A com- parative article she wrote discussing Jewish-Chilean writer Susana Sánchez Secretary: Jonathan Fleck Bravo will appear in the Helena María Viramontes Reader, forthcoming from Treasurer: Marina Flider U of Arizona Press. Social Coordinator: Thammika Songkaeo My deepest thanks to my colleagues in the Admissions Committee for their work in helping put together this remarkable selection of CL students. Conference Organizers: Katie Logan & Martino Lovato
Page 2 Comparative Literature Spring 2012 Fall 2012 Courses
Undergraduate Courses Graduate Courses C L 315 C L 180K Masterworks of World Literature Introduction to Comparative Literature: Brian Doherty Proseminar in Methods of Study and Research C L 323 César A. Salgado Classics of Persian Poetry Michael Hillmann C L 381 Medieval Rhetoric and Poetics Crossing Boundaries Marjorie Woods William Paul The Modern Metropolis Fictions of the Self and Other Sabine Hake Alexandra Wettlaufer Backgrounds of Modernism Holocaust Aftereffects-Honors Alan Friedman Pascale Bos 18th Century Poetry and Poetics Iranian Cinema Lisa Moore M. R. Ghanoonparvar C L 382 Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen Orientalism and Imperialism Jakob Holm Barbara Harlow Love in the East and West World Literature and Globalism: Theory and Jeannette Okur Practice Elizabeth Richmond-Garza Russia and Its World Guy Rappaport C L 386 Madness and Madmen in Russian Literature Sinophone Literature Michael Pesenson Susan Dolling C L 390 Supernatural in Traditional Chinese Fiction Literary & Cultural Theory Since 1900 Chiu-Mi Lai César A. Salgado The Qur’an Hina Azam Twentieth-Century Drama Elizabeth Richmond-Garza Us/Them: Czechs and Strangers Veronika Tuckerova 19th Century Polish Literature and Culture in Film Bernadeta Kaminska Carribean Literature Please visit the Comparative Literature Jennifer Wilks website for course descriptions: http://www.utexas.edu/cola/progs/ complit/courses/
Page 3 www.utexas.edu/cola/progs/complit Spring 2012 Student News and Profiles
Degree Recipients Elizabeth Warnock Fernea Endowment Fellowship
Master of Arts:
Spring 2011: Jonathan Fleck: The Self-Conscious Translator in Antonio Risério’s Fetiche (Fall 2012 degree) Katie Logan, Reading, Writing, Roaming: The student abroad in Arab women’s literature Elizabeth Warnock Fernea has devoted her life to Brian Mothersole: Documentaries, Salves, and greater understanding between the Middle East Slaves: Different Receptions of Physicality in Erich and the West. Herself an intrepid traveler, scholar Maria Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues and filmmaker, and ambassador for intercultural Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms exchange, Dr. Fernea was honored by friends, Nat Zingg: André Breton in Mexico: Surrealist Visions colleagues, and admirers upon her retirement of an “Independent Revolutionary” Landscape by the creation of an endowment. It supports John Destafney: The Dialectic of the Marvelous: graduate research in Comparative Literature which Graça Aranha’s Fictional Philosophizing focuses on the Middle East with a special emphasis on gender issues. Doctor of Philosophy: For five years now this endowment has funded Fall 2011: advanced research students in our program, Anna Katsnelson: De-Judaized Narratives and allowing them to undertake original archival Authors in Exile From the Jewish Self research and to write up their research. For the sixth year of the award, the program has decided to use Spring 2012: the available funds to supplement the studies of Carlos Amador: Singularly Ethical - The Southern current students doing important work in Middle Core’s 20/21st Century Eastern studies. Miguel Santos-Neves: Struggles With History: Relics Of Plantation Culture In Freyre And Faulkner Thanks to the generosity of the Fernea Endowment Simone Sessolo: Fractal Meta-Genres: Revisiting and the College of Liberal Arts, we are able to Master Narratives Through Contemporary Mystery supplement the studies of Ms. Fatma Tarlaci Fiction (Summer 2012) and Ms. Katie Logan, who will be attending and presenting at the second annual meeting of the Fall 2012: Institute of World Literature in Istanbul, and Mr. Nandini Dhar: Only My Revolt is Mine: Female Martino Lovato; who will be studying in Egypt as Heroism, Counter-Violence and Gendered he prepares his prospectus. Encouraging students Resistance in Contemporary Novels of Slavery with this endowment is precisely what Dr. Fernea would have desired. At the core of her career and life has always been a passion to bring cultures face- to-face, and the Program in Comparative Literature remains deeply grateful to her for making it possible for us to continue this work.
Page 4 Comparative Literature Spring 2012 Student News and Profiles Student and Alumni News
Prizes and Fellowships Alumni News
Continuing Dissertation Fellowships Hyunjung Lee’s article “‘Broadway’ as the Superior William S. Livingston Continuing Fellowship ‘Other’: Situating South Korean Theatre in the Era Pearl Brilmyer (2012-2013) of Globalization” has been published in the April 2012 issue of The Journal of Popular Culture. Also Named Continuing/Endowed Graduate School Fellowship she has co-edited a special issue on “Colonial Bhavya Tiwari (2012-2013) Modernity and Beyond: the East Asian Contexts” for Cultural Studies, which will be forthcoming in Comparative Literature Graduate Excellence Fellowship September 2012. Her article entitled “Emulating Michal Raizen (2012-2013) Modern Bodies: The Korean Version of Porgy and Jayita Sinha (2012-2013) Bess and American Popular Culture in the 1960s Franklin Strong (2012-2013) South Korea” is also included in this special is- sue. She is still very much enjoying her life as an Pre-Emptive Fellowships assistant professor in Singapore and is currently working on a monograph entitled Global Fetishism: Performing the Global in Contemporary South These fellowships are prestigious awards offered by the Graduate School to Korean Theatre. attract top quality graduate students to the university. Kaitlin Shirley (2012-2013) Lanie Millar will be a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Romance Languages at the Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowships University of Oregon for 2012-2013, where she will Marina Flider, Middle Eastern Studies, Hebrew (Summer 2012) teach courses on Latin American and Caribbean Zainab Cheema, Center for European Studies, Arabic (2012-2013) literature. Jonathan Fleck, LLILAS, Portuguese (2012-2013)
Other Fellowships and Awards Honors and National Service Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University Fatma Tarlaci, fourth year doctoral student, was Naminata Diabate (2012-2013) elected as one of the ACLA Graduate Student Representatives to serve the ACLA during the Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship in the field of Gender Justice in years 2011-2013. She was previously working as the Era of Human Rights from the Social Science Research Council/Andrew W. one of the graduate student assistants of the ACLA Mellon Foundation Secretariat at UT during 2010-11 academic year. Cynthia Francica (2012) Nandini Dhar won a competition for a position in Mitsubishi Graduate Research Fellowship the Center for Asian American Studies, teaching Thammika Songkaeo (2012) AAS 310, Food & Asian American Popular Culture.
Research Fellowships from Spanish and Portuguese Andrew Bennett (2012) Franklin Strong (2012)
Andrew Bennett also won a “Research Fellowship from the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies”
Page 5 www.utexas.edu/cola/progs/complit Spring 2012 Student News and Profiles
First Year Student Profiles (2011-12)
Hannah Alpert-Abrams graduated from Oberlin College in 2007 with a BA in English literature, where she later worked as a research assistant looking at poetry and performance theory in the early work of Jorge Luis Borges. Prior to coming to UT, she was an intern at the Centre for Creativity in Education and Cultural Heritage in Jerusalem, led wilderness trips, cut down trees, and collaborated on seven books, most recently in popular psychology. Her current research interests include archives, pilgrimages, pilgrimages as archival acts, and archives as pilgrimage sites.
Zainab Cheema has a BA in English from Johns Hopkins and an MA in Comparative Literature from UC Irvine. Fluent in Urdu and Arabic, she is interested in Transnational Modernisms in the South Asian and Afro-American contexts; she has done work with women’s advocacy groups in Lahore.
Mike Flynn holds a BS from the United States Naval Academy with a major in English and a minor in French, an MA in English Literature from the University of Maryland, and academic training in Chinese at Nanjing University and Johns Hopkins. He is also fluent in Italian and Spanish. He is interested in studying trauma theory and narratives as forms of PTSD therapy. Mike presented a paper entitled “Sophocles Heals the Iraq Veteran” at the 2012 ACLA conference. The paper analyzed readings of Greek tragedies that an innovative theatre troupe performed for soldiers suffering from PTSD and their families.
Irina Simova is a Fulbright fellow from Bulgaria with degrees from Sofia University and Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. She works on Latin, Ancient Greek, and German. She is interested in studying contemporary literary theory at UT with a focus on Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Benjamin. Having specialized in Weimar (Goethe-Gesellschaft) in the reception of ancient motifs in German Classicism and Romaticism, she continues to work on problems of knowledge production and figurations of the body (i.e. ideology construction) in the same periods.
Thammika Songkaeo graduated from Williams College in 2011, with a B.A. in French Literature and in Asian Studies. Her undergraduate thesis, a literary outlet for her culinary passion, examines how food portrays savagery in Émile Zola’s L’Assommoir and Le Ventre de Paris. At UT, she plans to continue her study of Zola, while supplementing her understanding of French Naturalism with Japanese Naturalism. Having grown up in Thailand, India, and Los Angeles, and now hopping on planes biweekly (as she is an ardent believer of study breaks), Thammika also questions how space and place converse with identity.
Mehdi Torabian received his MA in English from the University of Tehran in 2008 after spending a year at UT as a Fulbright scholar. He spent three years teaching English as a foreign language in his home country and arrived at UT in L to R: First-year students Mehdi Torabian, 2011 to begin the graduate program in Comparative Literature. Thammika Songkaeo, Hannah Alpert-Abrams, Irina He is currently working on his interests in Renaissance and Simova, Zainab Cheema, Mike Flynn 20-century drama, new historicism, and cultural studies.
Page 6 Comparative Literature Spring 2012 Student News and Profiles Student News and Profiles
2011 GRACLS Conference Reflections: Identity after Crisis by Roanne Kantor
On september 30th and October 1, the Program in Comparative Literature held the Seventh Annual Graduate Comparative Literature conference, en- titled “Reflections: Identity after Crisis.” Inspired by the tenth anniversary of September 11th, the conference explored the ways that societies reflect, re- vive, and rebuild in the wake of large-scale traumatic events. We asked par- ticipants to engage critically with the terms “crisis,” “trauma,” and “response” in order to produce work that would expand our understanding of those terms and the literatures that embody them.
The broad focus of the conference allowed participants to explore the many languages and literatures in which the notion of crisis has intersected with ideas of personal, national, and global identity in the last decade and throughout history. We considered both those literatures that help to heal wounds of trauma and those which cause them to fester, both those that work to erect borders and those that act as a bridge between identities, and finally the role of scholars and educators in shaping the study of these literatures. The participants of the conference Dr. Idelber Avelar delivered the Plenary represented an enormous variety of disciplines, language backgrounds Address entitled, “Rituals and Fictions of and objects of study, everything from an exploration of the connection Masculinity in Jorge Luis Borges” of the representations of the American 9/11 and the 9/11 recognized in Chile – the date of the 1973 coup – to a first-person account of the Arab Spring in Egypt and a panel on the revolutions in foreign teaching right here at the University of Texas.
The conference was capped off by plenary address from Professor Idelbar Avelar entitled “Rituals and Fictions of Masculinity in Jorge Luis Borges.” The audience for Professor Avelar’s speech filled the Avaya auditorium on Friday night. Dr. Avelar is a Professor of Literature in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Tulane University and the author of several critically recognized books: Figuras da Violência (UFMG, 2011), The Letter of Violence: Essays on Narrative, Ethics, and Politics (Palgrave, 2004), and The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning (Duke, 1999), winner of the MLA Kovacs prize and also published in Portuguese and Spanish. He has been the recipient of Ford, Rockefeller, Hewlett, and ACLS grants, and has recently won the Brazilian Foreign Ministry international essay contest on Machado de Assis. He has published over 60 scholarly articles on Latin American literature and literary theory in Europe and the Americas, and is currently working on a manuscript on masculinity in Latin American narrative, from which his speech derived. Dr. Avelar’s presentation was given a thoughtful introduction by Dr. Elizabeth Richmond-Garza.
The conference organizers would like to extend a special thanks to the following people for helping to make the conference such a success: Dean Randy Diehl; Senior Associate Dean Richard Flores; Vice-Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Victoria Rodríguez; Dr. Elizabeth Richmond-Garza, Director of the Program in Comparative Literature; Dr. César A. Salgado, Graduate Advisor in the Program in Comparative Literature; Dr. Douglas Biow and the Center for European Studies; Dr. David Birdsong and the Department of French and Italian; Dr. Elizabeth Cullingford and the Department of English; Dr. Thomas J. Garza and the Texas Language Center; Dr. Charles R. Hale and the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies; Dr. Susan Sage Heinzelman and the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies; Dr. Peter Hess and the Department of Germanic Studies; Dr. Mary Neuberger and the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies and CREEES; Dr. Kristen Brustad and the department of Middle Eastern Studies; Dr. Jill Robbins and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese; and William Fatzinger, Graduate Coordinator for the Program in Comparative Literature.
Page 7 www.utexas.edu/cola/progs/complit Spring 2012 Student News and Profiles
Dissertation Research at the Max Planck Institute of the History of Science in Berlin by Pearl Brilmyer
For the 2011-2012 academic year I left Austin to conduct my dissertation re- search on nineteenth-century literature and science at the Max Planck Institute of the History of Science (MPI) in Berlin, Germany. My stay was made possible by a grant from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).
This year has been a rewarding one—not only for the freedom I have to focus on my dissertation in a city I love—but for the expansive thinking that emerges upon stepping outside of one’s disciplinary comfort zone. At the Max Planck Institute I had the opportunity to participate in a community of historians of science with different questions, approaches, and textual practices than those of literary studies. This experience has had an important effect on my thinking about literature, inspiring me to perform more rigorous historical research, but also to better develop and define my distinctly literary approach about the way that feeling is built through texts. In my work there on novelist George Eliot, for instance, I showed how her at- tempts to highlight the sensible aspects of human character by describing persons in terms of animals put her late character sketches in conversation with the nineteenth-century tradition of natural history writing.
My experience at MPI has taught me the value of thinking broadly about the import of my research as well as ap- plying and reapplying for each and every relevant source of funding. This year’s research opportunity is the direct result of those two efforts: I was awarded the DAAD Research Grant after an unsuccessful application the year be- fore and I found myself at the Max Planck Institute as a result of an email to the director that explained the viability of my research and its connection to projects already underway at the institute. Building an international network for yourself and your research, I have begun to learn, emerges out of simple and persistent acts of communication; and, of course, the more emails and applications you write, the better you become at articulating your work.
For me, comparatism is not only about performing cross-national or cross-linguistic research, but cross-disciplinary work that continually interrogates the limits of its own practice. My time in Berlin has been valuable for the oppor- tunity it has afforded me to speak and read German on a daily basis—something essential to my dissertation work. But what’s more, Berlin’s diverse landscape of scholars, artists, and technologists has inspired me to experiment with my own research methods. To this end I recently participated in a workshop for women interested in learning the computer language Ruby with the hopes of (someday) building new tools for reading and textual visualization.
This summer I will return to the U.S. to participate in a NEH Summer Seminar on Oscar Wilde at the Clark Library in Los Angeles. My research in Berlin on nineteenth-century scientific discourse, no doubt, will serve me well there as I explore Wilde’s interest in the relationship between character and bodily materiality: “who could say where the fleshly impulse ceased, or the psychical impulse began?” Lord Henry wonders inThe Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, 1891). Given how inseparable the flesh is from thought, I am grateful for the opportunity to have spent a year in such a stimulating environment.
Page 8 Comparative Literature Spring 2012 Student News and Profiles Student News and Profiles
Experiences in Post-Mubarak Cairo by Michal Raizen
When I reflect on my experience as a fellow at the Center for Arabic Study Abroad my mind gravitates toward the veritable maze of concrete walls and barbed wire surrounding the American University campus in downtown Cairo. These walls are covered with incredible works of art—large colorful murals featuring pharaonic imagery; memorials to those who lost their lives in the Maspero Massacre, the Port Said Massacre, or the Battle for Mohammad Mahmoud (the street adjacent to the AUC campus), as the most violent clashes of the last year have come to be known; optical illusions which extend the characteristic din of the Cairo street into the walls in a concerted artistic effort to transform the barriers into canvases.
Thought does not abide by walls. This axiom has new meaning for me after a tumultuous but intensely gratifying year of study in post-Mubarak Egypt. When clashes erupted downtown in November, my classes were moved to a safer location across the Nile. Within a week, the area surrounding the American University had become a warzone. The CASA administration encouraged us to go about our studies as usual, but the volatile situation made it exceedingly difficult to concentrate. And so a different kind of learning set in, one based on hours of conversation with our teachers, who shared with us their most painful thoughts and experiences as well as their hopes for a brighter future.
I am deeply humbled by their dedication and passion in the face of adversity, and I am grateful to them for engaging us in candid conversation. Though the CASA curriculum admittedly suffered some setbacks this year, the learning that took place was nonetheless tremendous. My personal journey was enhanced by several extra- curricular activities, among them a language exchange with the author Mansoura Ez Eldin. I had the privilege of hearing about her childhood in the Egyptian Delta, her habit of hiding Egyptian newspapers in her schoolbooks, her various strategies for sneaking fiction into her life away from the disapproving eye, her move to Cairo at the age of eighteen, and the beginning of her career as an author. I will never forget her chilling account of the Battle for Mohammad Mahmoud and how she and her husband, also a novelist, would write their names and phone numbers on their arms and set out with the knowledge that they might not live to see their daughter again. This is a woman who has scaled many walls in her lifetime and continues to fight for the freedom to live her life and practice her art.
The atmosphere in Cairo has calmed down significantly since the last round of clashes in February, yet the walls downtown stand as a constant reminder of the continuing struggle for freedom and social justice. My experi- ence here will no doubt leave a profound impact on my life and work, and I am deeply indebted to the amazing people who afforded me a unique glimpse into the intricate workings of such a struggle.
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Page 9 www.utexas.edu/cola/progs/complit Spring 2012 Student News and Profiles Teaching an Upper-division Seminar Course “Celebrando a Virgilio” at the University of by Heather Latiolais-Eure Miami by Andrew Bennett This year, I was offered a new award, the Graduate School A list of the playwrights Teaching Fellowship, to design who were present and teach an upper-division at the University of Comparative Literature semi- Miami’s conference nar grounded in research from “Celebrando a Virgilio” my dissertation. I thus created in January reads like a the course, “Fakes, Fictions, who’s-who of twentieth and Fantasies of Gender in the century Cuban theatre: Nineteenth Century,” and taught José Triana, Matías it to a classroom of undergradu- Montes Huidobro, ates this Spring. My students Julio Matas, Raúl de enjoyed reading the seven works of French, British, and Cardenas. These pivotal American fiction published between 1830 and 1899 that we figures, now living in studied together, including texts such as Balzac’s Sarrasine L-R: Andrew Bennett, Dr. César A. exile, came together and Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, most of which they might Salgado, Pilar Cabrera with other mem- never have had an opportunity to read outside this seminar. bers of the diapsoric I was thrilled by the challenge of teaching these texts to a Cuban community to celebrate the life and work of Virgilio group of students from a wide variety of academic fields. Piñera, playwright, poet, novelist and provocateur. 2012 is the centennial of Piñera’s birth, and Montes Huidobro, When designing the course, I had to keep in mind that it chief coordinator of the conference, celebrated the occa- would attract undergraduates from quite an array of majors, sion with a truly memorable gathering, inviting renowned especially because the class fulfilled a university writing scholars, journalists, and authors, as well as a substantial requirement. Indeed, my students hailed from the natural part of the exile Cuban theatre community. sciences, radio/television/film, government, and interna- I was honored to present my work on Piñera’s relevance tional relations, as well as from English and French. Via our during Cuba’s Special Period in the company of so many course blog, stimulating discussion, oral presentation assign- noteworthy authorities on Cuban culture, literature and ments on social and historical context, and the integration theatre, among them Comp. Lit.’s own Professor César of a variety of other written and multi-media texts into the Salgado and alum Pilar Cabrera. Dramatic productions classroom, I was able to render these seven works accessible of the work of Piñera and other playwrights of his epoch to the wide range of students in my course as well as intro- punctuated the four days of the conference. The experi- duce them to the field of Comparative Literature. ence of attending Teatro Prometeo Company’s perfor- mance of Julio Matas’ Juegos y rejuegos with Matas and One of the goals the Graduate School had in mind when Triana present as members of the audience was thrilling; introducing this fellowship was to develop outstanding the memory of Triana’s recitation at the end of the night of graduate student instructors ready for the teaching they will a poem he composed to honor Matas and the days they do in tenure-track positions post-graduation. This opportu- shared in the Havana of their youth is one that I will trea- nity helped me learn to balance the task of rigorous course sure always. preparation with research, to prepare students for more In June of 2012 I will attend a conference to be held in intensive writing projects than those they may have com- Havana, also convened in order to mark Piñera’s centen- pleted in previous coursework, and to make Comparative nial. This year has offered me an extraordinary opportunity Literature an area approachable, and in fact, pleasurable, to to witness first-hand the effects of the Cuban diaspora in undergraduates from within and outside the liberal arts. As Miami and Havana, as the artistic communities of both seek I finish my PhD, I am delighted to have had this chance to to lay claim to Piñera’s legacy. I can only hope my experi- strengthen my skills as an instructor by teaching my upper- ence at the conference in Havana will be as remarkable as division Comparative Literature seminar. was my time in Miami. Page 10 Comparative Literature Spring 2012 Student News and Profiles Research with a FLAS by Marina Flider
Some months ago, I was sitting in a coffee shop with my first-year Croatian textbook on the table and a copy of Ivo Andrić’s Bridge on the Drina in hand, settling into an afternoon of all things Croatian. As captivating as Andric’s novel was (especially the impalement scene), I couldn’t help but notice the gentle- man sitting next to me, who was staring at the BCS for Beginners textbook with great disbelief. Finally, he leaned over and asked, “I’m sorry, are you studying Croatian?” I nodded. He shook his head, waited a minute, and finally asked, ”But why!?” I gave him the generic spiel I have constructed for distant relatives and neighbors who inquire about my life’s pursuits. This, however, did not deter him. He persisted, thoroughly unimpressed: “But if you are a graduate student, shouldn’t you be studying something profitable -- like Mandarin, or Arabic? You see, I am Croatian, and I can tell you that there is no money to be had from learning the language of my country. Trust me, I tried.”
Petre, the Croat, was obviously wrong. Last spring, the Center for European Studies awarded me a Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship to study Croatian for the 2011-2012 academic year. As a result, I had the opportunity to take a break from teaching and concentrate on my research. I had assumed that transition- ing from Russian, my heritage language, to Croatian, would be easy, and I decided to devote the academic year fully to Croatian language and literature immersion. As always, these things are easier said than done. It turns out that Croatian is not Russian’s coy linguistic cousin; nor can Croatia’s literary heritage be easily equated to Russia’s. Instead, I engaged in the humbling task of foreign language acquisition, and found that while Russian and Croatian are oftentimes mutually intelligible, imposing my knowledge of the Russian language onto Croatian resulted in an indiscernible Slavic monstrosity. At the same time, as I read through the Croatian literary canon, I discovered a country that was European while still upholding traditions, both narrative and commonplace, from the time of the Ottoman Empire. How different this was from Russia’s European-aspiring prose! FLAS Fellowship Award Information The highly competitive Foreign Language and Area A year later, I see just how much the FLAS has given Studies Fellowship is funded by the U.S. Department me, both in terms of professional development and of Education and assists meritorious graduate stu- my research. The patient language instruction of Dr. dents undergoing intensive training in modern lan- Larisa Zlatic has put me well on way to acquiring guages and related area or international studies. my second Slavic language, and the guidance of Dr. Academic Year Awards: Tatiana Kuzmic helped me get my bearings in Croatian $15,000, plus tuition and fees for up to 9 hours literature. Over the course of the year, I has it became Summer Awards: clear that Croatian literature would be the perfect $2,500, plus tuition and fees for an intensive lan- link between Russian and Hebrew (my second area of guage course study) literatures, bridging -- sometimes problemati- Application Deadlines: cally, sometimes beautifully -- the gap between Russia Vary, but generally mid-December and the Middle East, much like Andrić articulates in his novel. Page 11 www.utexas.edu/cola/progs/complit Spring 2012 Student News and Profiles
On the Publication of The Superstitions of Victorian England (Sueveriya Viktorianskoy Anglii) by Katya Cotey
I started writing my first book The Superstitions of Victorian England (Sueveriya Viktorianskoy Anglii) while studying Polish through the SWSEEL program at Indiana University, Bloomington, in Summer 2010. While staying in Bloomington, I had access to the IU Libraries’ Folklore collection, the largest collection of folkloric material in the USA, and spent all my free time browsing through the volumes of folklore anthologies. This research proved indispensable for my dissertation, which examines the representation of the uncanny chil- dren in 19th century English and Russian litera- ture. At the same time, I felt the need to share this knowledge with my friends in Russia or, as a matter of fact, with anybody interested in English folklore and 19th century studies. As a blogger writing about Victorian England for a Russian-speaking audience, I was aware of the un- quenchable interest that the Russians possess for all things English. That interest was sparked by the formidable projects accomplished by the Soviet translators: Charles Dickens and the Bronte sisters, Robert Burns and Walter Scott were translated so flaw- lessly that they became a part of Russian culture. However, there is still much to say about English folklore, especially for the non-academic audience that has no access to the authentic folkloric texts. Thus, I decided to write a book about English supersti- tions, contextualizing them in the everyday life of Victorian England. Natalia Kharsa, a promising poet from Novosibirsk, agreed to do the translations of several ballads and poems, and together we spent about 8 months immersed in English folklore. Since its publication in October 2011 (Moscow, Tsentrpoligraf), our book has become quite popular among the Russian fans of English history and folklore. I would like to thank Dr. Richmond-Garza and Dr. Garza for their guidance, encouragement, and their research that highlights the relevance of folklore in the contemporary literary studies. I am also deeply grateful to Dr. Straubhaar for introducing me to English ballads and unfolding before me the richness of folkloric texts.
Page 12 www.utexas.edu/cola/progs/complit Spring 2012 Faculty News
On the Publication of Translations of Ainkurunūru’s Tamil Love Poetry by Martha Ann Selby
My translation of the Ainkurunūru was published by Columbia University Press in their “Translations from the Asian Classics” series in May 2011. The text contains 500 haiku-like poems on various romantic themes. Each poem ranges in length from three to six lines, and are the compositions of five master poets of the Tamil language who lived in the late second and early third centuries C.E. I began the translation in the summer of 1997 and finished it in early 2009, picking it up and working on it over several hot summers in Chennai and during my ten- ure as Walter Jackson Bate Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2004-05) and as a Guggenheim Fellow (2005-06). This was the first time that I had become so intimate with a text, and as is the case with enigmatic poetry such as this, in which every little morpheme conveys a gesture, it was a struggle, but a delightful one. The text has become part of my mental hardwiring, and I had what can only be described as separation anxiety when I finished it. The poems trace the romance of a young couple from their first clandestine meet- ings, through their elopement and eventual marriage, and through moments of separation and infidelity. Each romantic mood is tied to a very specific land- scape, and the poets very skillfully use geographical features, flora, and fauna to comment on the virtues of the heroine and the foibles of her lover.
On the Publication of, Group Identity in the Renaissance World by Hannah Chappelle Wojciehowski
Like Martha’s project, my book Group Identity in the Renaissance World took shape over a number of years. It began to crystalize after a trip to Goa, India, at the end of the millennium, the result of which was the realization that the European Renaissance might owe a great deal to India. I began to think about flows of in- formation around the globe during the sixteenth century, and to speculate about Renaissance knowledge building, together with the Scientific Revolution, as the possible result of such flows. It turns out that many scholars in quite different fields were thinking along similar lines.
A second event shortly thereafter also shaped the book I was writing in profound ways. In the spring of 2002, I was a fellow at the Institute for the Study of Violence, Survival, and Culture at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, based in Charlottesville, Virginia. At that time the country was still reeling from the events of 9/11. One of our guest speakers that spring was the Turkish Cypriot psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan, a brilliant thinker who studies the phenomenon of ethnic conflict and group identity formation. After hearing Volkan speak and then reading his books, I began to think that the Renaissance could be explored from the perspective of shifting and transforming group identities, and that the often highly individualistic accounts of the men and women of that era could be supple- mented with an analysis of groups. Building on the work of social historians, I suggest ways of conceptualizing “group subjectivity” in the context of early modern globalization.
Page 13 Comparative Literature Spring 2012 Faculty News
On the Publication of, Sister Arts: The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes, Winner of the 2012 Lambda Literary Award by Lisa Moore
As British imperial power grew over the eighteenth century, English artists were no longer content to take second place to the trend-setting French and Italians. Perhaps the French were the best painters and the Italians the best poets, but the emerging masterpieces of English landscape design, critics argued, deserved pride of place in this pantheon. “Poetry, painting and gardening,” decreed the influential tastemaker Horace Walpole, “will forever by men of taste be deemed Three Sisters.” Skeptical of the com- pleteness of standard accounts of this tradition that assumed that women were exclud- ed from it, I set out to put “sisters” into the Sister Arts.
I eventually settled on four protagonists: bluestocking wit, botanical illustrator and gar- den designer Mary Granville Pendarves Delany; her beloved friend, the famous natural- ist Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, Duchess of Bulstrode; Romantic poet Anna Seward, famous for her landscape poems to a lost love named Honora; and Sarah Pierce, who wrote what is often considered the first lesbian poem in American literature. In the final chapter of the book, I describe how this alternative sister arts tradition persists in present-day art and literature. On the Publication of, Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman: Painting and the Novel in France and Britain, 1800-1860 (2011) by Alexandra Wettlaufer
Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman: Painting and the Novel in France and Britain, 1800-1860 (2011), is a comparative and interdisciplinary examination of the construc- tion of female artistic identity in the nineteenth century. In close readings of paint- ings by women and novels about women painting, I chart the political and cultural resonances of this artistic self-representation, tracing its evolution through themes of the “The Studio” (Part I), “Cosmopolitan Visions (Part II), and “The Portrait” (Part III). By pairing painting and literature in a single study that also considers works from two distinct but closely related cultures, I hoped to locate the interpretation of these works in the dialogic context in which they were created and consumed, highlight- ing the aesthetic and political intersections between nineteenth-century French and British art, literature, and feminisms that are too often elided by the disciplinary boundaries of scholarship. I began research for the project in 2003 on a fellowship at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, MA, where I benefitted enormously from working with art historians on these questions of gender and self-representation. In 2005, I taught a Comp Lit graduate seminar on “Interdisciplinary Studies in Gender and Genre: Portraits of the Female Artist in the Nineteenth Century” and in working on many of the images and texts that are included in my book (including Anne Brontë’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore’s L’Atelier d’un peintre, Anna Mary Howitt’s The Sisters in Art, and George Sand’s Elle et lui) with my students (drawn from Art History, English, Comp Lit, and French) I came to much more nuanced understandings of these understudied novels. Finally, a year-long fellowship in 2007-08 at the National Humanities Center in NC allowed me to finish writing the book in the most wonderful, interdisciplinary context imaginable, surrounded by 35 scholars from around the world working on a variety of fascinating projects.
Page 14 Comparative Literature Spring 2012 ACLA ACLA 2012
This year the annual ACLA Conference was held at Brown University from March 29 - April 1, 2012. A number of Comparative Literature faculty and graduate students participated in the conference as presenters and panel organizers.
Carlos Amador, doctoral student, presented “Rethinking Visuality in Post-Theory Latin America: Hybridity, the State as Visual Form, and the Novel as Visual Medium” in the seminar, “Rethinking Intellectuals in Latin America and Beyond: Global Crises, Political Change, Ecological Catastrophe and the Future of Intellectual Work,” which he also organized. Katherine Arens, professor, presented “Lost in Cambridge: How Austrian Philosophy Lost its Conceptual Persona” in the seminar, “In Dark Times: Catastrophic Dislocations,” which she also orga- nized. Zainab S. Cheema, first-year student, presented “Image, Caption, and Loss in India’s Colonial Photography: The Post-1857 Photographic Albums of Lucknow’s Darogha Abbas Ali” in the semi- nar, “Post-: Remembering, Binding, Afterness.” Hector Domiguez-Ruvalcaba, associate professor, presented “Intellectuales frente al fenómeno de la violencia” in the seminar, “Rethinking Intellectuals in Latin America and Beyond: Global Crises, Political Change, Ecological Catastrophe and the Future of Intellectual Work.” Tarek El-Ariss, assistant professor, presented “Revealing the Hidden in European Arts: The Poetics of Aversion in Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq (1804-1886)” in the seminar, “The Collapse of Disciplines in Discourses of Other Sexualities.” Michael Flynn, first-year student, presented “Theater of War: Sophocles Heals the Iraq Veteran” in the seminar, “Trauma, Recovery, and Community II.” Thomas J. Garza, associate professor, presented “Take Me Away! Russia’s New Literature of Escapism” in the seminar, “Powder Kegs, Iron Curtains, and Velvet Revolutions: Eastern European and Eurasian Literatures and Cultures in Discourse(s) of Crisis.” Cory A. Hahn, second-year doctoral student, presented “Tropa de Elite 2: Media(tion) and Violence” in the seminar, “Traumatic Postmodernity: Violent Introspection, Repression and Transgression in Recent Latin American Narratives. Martino Lovato, third-year doctoral student, presented “Méditerranée sans midi: Reconstructing the Sunna in A. Kechiche’s L’Esquive” in the seminar, “Mediterranean Modernisms” Elizabeth Richmond-Garza, associate professor and program director, presented “Detecting the Dandiacal Body: A Century in Queer Profiles from London’s Sherlock Holmes to Moscow’s Erast Petrovich Fandorin” in the seminar, “Global Masculinities: Film and Gender Crisis.” Johanna B. Sellman, doctoral candidate, presented “The Reappearance of the Muselmann in Arabic Literature of (Im)migration to Europe” in the seminar, “Muselmann/’Muslim’: Memory, Translation, Race.” Simone Sessolo, doctoral student, presented “An Epic of Riots: The Multitude As Hero in The Black Audio Film Collective’s Handsworth Songs” in the seminar, “The Violence of Economics and the Economics of Violence.”
Page 15 Comparative Literature Spring 2012 ACLA Maryam Shariati, third-year doctoral student, presented “Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood” in the seminar, “Children of Men: Childhood in Narratives of Crisis and Catastrophe.” Irina Simova, first year student, presented “Heidegger, Art, and Politics: Heidegger’s Art Discourse and Lacoue-Labarthe’s Identity Politics” in the seminar, “In Dark Times: Catastrophic Dislocations.” Franklin W. Strong, fourth-year doctoral student, presented “Of Salsa and Son: Ana Lydia Vega’s Neobaroque Response to Carpentier” in the seminar, “Performing Crises of Existence in the Caribbean and Latin America.” Fatma Tarlaci, fourth-year doctoral student, organized the ADPCL and Graduate Caucus Roundtable titled Non-Tenure Track Job Market that featured speakers David Damrosch, Martina Kolb, and Adam Miyashiro at the ACLA Annual Conference 2012. Bhavya Tiwari, fourth-year doctoral student, presented “Poetry, Translation and Comparative Literature: Mistral and Mahadevi” in the seminar, “Crisis in Translation” Lynn R. Wilkinson, Associate Professor, presented “Towards an Aesthetic of the Close-Up: Strindberg and Béla Balázs’s Visible Man” in the seminar, “100 Years Later: Strindberg the Modern?” News in Brief Samer Ali is currently working on Traditions of People Power in the Islamic Middle Ages and he delivered a part of the book in February at the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute. The paper focused on Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi’s chapter in Imta’ wal-Mu’anasa (Pleasure and Camaraderie) on animals (including humans). He was also elected to the MLA Executive Council.
Daniela Bini published “Marco Tutino’s La lupa: A Neo-romantic, Postmodern Opera” in Saggi sul plurilinguismo nella cultura italiana (NY and Canada: Legas, 2011) and “Leonardo Sciascia’s A ciascuno il suo: The Failure of the Intellectual” in D. Renga, ed. Mafia Movies: A Reader (Toronto UP, 2011). She gave the Connie De Marco Lecture at Florida Atlantic University on “Verdi, Woman and Nation”(February 2011). She delivered the same lecture at Georgetown University and as keynote at the symposium for Italy’s150th Anniversary at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh (October). She also gave papers at Indiana University, at the American Association for Italian Studies at the University of Pittsburgh and in Rome. This April she gave a mini-seminar at Yale on the representation of Women in Sicilian Culture and a lecture on Carlo Michelstaedter at the University of Pennsylvania .
Pearl Brilmyer spent the 2011-2012 academic year as a Predoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin on a research fellowship from the German Exchange Service (DAAD). In the fall she presented on work on Victorian novelist George Eliot and natural history writing as part of the MPI Predoctoral Seminar, and in the spring she presented on Schopenhauer’s popularity amongst British women writers at the “Entanglements in New Materialisms” conference in Linköping, Sweden. In Summer 2012 Pearl will participate in a summer seminar on Oscar Wilde at the Clark Library in Los Angeles, California with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Following this she will finish her dissertation on a William S. Livingston Continuing Fellowship from UT Austin.
Heather Latiolais Eure presented a paper entitled “Motionless Bodies and Living Pictures in Vanity Fair and La Curée” in the panel “Images of Static Spaces in a Spinning World” that she organized at the 2012 Interdisciplinary Nineteenth- Century Studies Conference in Lexington, Kentucky. She also was selected by the Center for Teaching and Learning to participate in their Graduate Teaching Scholars Certificate Seminar in fall 2011. As a recipient of the Graduate School Teaching Fellowship, she taught an upper-division Comparative Literature seminar of her own design in the spring.
Jonathan Fleck published a review in the E3W Review of Books; presented at conferences at UT and at the University of California: Santa Barbara; and received grants for summer research in Brazil from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and from the International Office at UT.
Mike Flynn presented a paper entitled “Sophocles Heals the Iraq Veteran” at the 2012 ACLA conference. The paper analyzed readings of Greek tragedies that an innovative theatre troupe performed for soldiers suffering from PTSD and their families.
Thomas J. Garza was presented with the American Council of Teachers of Russian Service to the Profession Award in January. He was also elected vice president of ACTR at their annual board meeting. He presented in “Russian Restive Page 16 www.utexas.edu/cola/progs/complit Spring 2012 News in Brief Horses and Cowboys: On Teaching the Works of Vysotsky in Texas” at the International Documentary Film Festival on the Works of Vladimir Vysotsky in Koszalin, Poland in January. This year, Dr. Garza also pub- lished “(Un)Chained melodies: Russian Music Videos in Web-based Language and Culture Instruction,” in Mnemosynon: Studies on Language and Culture in the Russophone World, “Blogging and Tweeting and Chat, Oh My! Social Networks and Classroom Culture, and Foreign Language Instruction” in Russian Language Journal, vol. 60, and “From Russia with Blood: Imagining the Vampire in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture,” in The Universal Vampire Series Vol. 1: Origins and Evolution of a Legend. Garza also presented papers at a variety of conferences this year: “(Un)Chained Melodies: Using Music Videos in Russian Language and Culture Instruction,” plenary talk at the Defense Language Institute, “Intensive Instruction: Teaching Russian Language and Culture Intensive(ly),” ACTR Roundtable and “Best Practices in the Russian Classroom,” at AATSEEL Convention, Seattle, WA., “Re-envisioning Foreign Language Education in The Current Economy,” AAUSC Roundtable, “Language, literature, and ... ? New Models for Foreign Language Departments,” at MLA Convention, Seattle, WA, “Keeping It Real: Intensive Instruction and the Future of Russian Instruction in the US,” Symposium on Russian Language Teaching in the US, UC Irvine, and “Take Me Away! Escapism in Russian Science Fiction Film and Literature,” ACLA Convention, Brown University, Providence, RI.
M. R. Ghanoonparvar presented “War Veterans Turned Writers of War Narratives” at NYU in Abu Dhabi; “The Irish and Iranians in Simin Daneshvar’s Savushun: Sharing Poetic Sensitivity and Misery” at University College Cork, Ireland ; “Through Tinted Lenses: New Media Travel Narratives” at the MESA conference in Washington DC; and “Iranian Film and Persian Fiction: Interdependence, Interaction, and Exchange” at the University of Arizona. He published “Modern Iranian Fiction” in The Literary Encyclopedia and the “Afterword” to Perpetual Death and Resurrection: Collected Poems of Leonardo P. Alishan, and edited and co-translated Horse’s Head by Ja’far Modarres-Sadeqi.
John Morán González received a CMAS Faculty Research Fellowship during the Fall 2011 semester. He also co-organized the Spring 2012 Lozano Long Conference on “Central Americans and the Latina/o Landscape: New Configurations of Latina/o America.”
Karen Grumberg was promoted to Associate Professor this year. Her first book, Place and Ideology in Contemporary Hebrew Literature, was published this fall by Syracuse University Press. She also published an article entitled “On Sons and (M)others: the Spectropoetics of Exile in Autobiographical Writing by Amos Oz and Albert Cohen” in Prooftexts. She wrote the Afterword to Dalkey Press’s new English translation of Israeli author Orly Castel-Bloom’s novel Dolly City. Prof Grumberg spent the Spring semester on a Fulbright fellowship at the University of Oslo, Norway, where she taught courses on Hebrew literature and conducted research for an article on intersections between Hebrew and Scandinavian literary modernism. She is also currently completing her American Association of University Women Postdoctoral Research Leave Fellowship, awarded for a year’s research toward her next book, on Gothic tropes in Hebrew literature. In August, she presented a paper on A. B. Yehoshua and Hebrew Gothic in Heidelberg, Germany, at the Gothic Studies Association biannual confer- ence. In November, she presented a paper on Agnon’s Gothic stories at the “All That Gothic” conference at the University of Łódź, Poland. She was also married in June at Hamar, Norway.
Cory Hahn was married, helped coordinate the university’s first Summer Language Institute, founded an inter- disciplinary Registered Student Organization (Comparative Americanists at UT Austin), published a review for the E3W Review of Books, and presented a paper at the ACLA Conference at Brown University.
Sabine Hake’s new book, Screen Nazis: Cinema, History, and Democracy is forthcoming in June with University of Wisconsin Press. In AY 2011-12, she has given several talks from the book in the US and Europe. With the support of a DAAD Fellowship, she will spend several months in Berlin this summer starting research on a new project on the cultural history of the German proletariat.
Julianna Leachman and her husband, Taylor, celebrated the birth of their daughter, Emilia Grace on October 30, 2011
Roanne Kantor is a fourth-year graduate student working on literature in Spanish, Hindi, Urdu and English. She recently presented a paper called “Greetings from a Cesspool: Irony and kitsch in fiction about rural India” at the Texas South Asia conference and another paper entitled “Augusto d’Halmar and Trans-orientalism” at the 20th Colloquium on Spanish and Luso-Brazillian Literatures and Linguistics at UT. She will be married June 17th and accompany her husband to his field site in Bihar, India as a research assistant in the second half of the 2012-2013 academic year. Page 16 www.utexas.edu/cola/progs/complit Spring 2012 Page 17 Comparative Literature Spring 2012 News in Brief
Somy Kim was awarded the Hutchison Continuing Fellowship for dissertation writing in the 2011-12 academic year. After returning from summer research in Amsterdam and Beirut, she presented her paper “Through the Looking Glass: Negotiating Crisis in Postwar Iranian and Lebanese Cinema” at the annual Middle East Studies Association confer- ence in Washington, D.C. in December. At MESA she also served as discussant for the panel, “The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted: Social Media and Uprisings in the Middle East.” She organized two discussion groups at UT; Middle Eastern Literatures & Theory and a weekly Persian Table. In February, she organized and presented on the panel, “New Transformations in the Study of Arabic Literature” at the Jil Jadid conference at UT Austin. She is currently working on a Persian language pedagogy module on how to teach differentiated reading in Persian which will go online this year. This summer she will be a teaching assistant for the Intensive Persian Summer Language Institute at UT Austin.
Naomi Lindstrom received a 2011-2012 President’s Associates Teaching Excellence Award. In December 2011 she was named Associate Director of the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies at UT Austin. She published “Las transfor- maciones del discurso profético en la obra de José Kozer” in Hispanic Poetry Review and the overview article on “Latin America” in The Cambridge Dictionary of Judaism and Jewish Culture. She presented the papers “César Tiempo ante la tradición profética” at the XV International Research Conference of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association,” June 2011, and “Las ciudades malditas en la obra de Samuel Rawet” at the conference Jews and the City: Jewish Latin American Culture in Its Urban Context, at the Center for Jewish History in New York, March 2012.
Karen Pagani’s article, “Judging Oswald within the Limits of Reason Alone in Madame de Staël’s Corinne” was pub- lished in The European Romantic Review this past winter (volume 23.2). Her article, “The Uses and Abuses of Joseph Butler’s Account of Forgiveness: Between the Passions and the Interests” was selected for the Kirby Prize for “Best Article” by The South Central Review’s editorial board. She was invited to present her paper and forthcoming article, “And if Voltaire Ceased to be Voltaire?: The Influence of Fénelon’s Quietism on Voltaire’s Later Works,” at the Center for Early Modern Research at The University of Potsdam, and will be presenting there this summer. She recently com- pleted and submitted for review a book-length manuscript entitled Forgiving Men and Citizens: Conflict and Subjectivity in the Thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. She is currently working on a second book project entitled Marginal Prophet Figures: Accounting for Forgiveness in the Age of Reason. This work is an attempt to articulate the secular history of the concept of forgiveness in France and England in the early-modern period, and is nearing completion. Two of her book reviews were published in academic journals during the 2011-12 academic year.
Lanie Millar’s article “’A Friendship Forged With Blood’: Cuban Literature of the Angolan War” is forthcoming in Romance Notes, and “La ironía en dos obras de Carpentier: El siglo de las luces y La consagración de la primavera” was accepted to the book collection 200/100/50: Carpentier y la independencia de las américas. She presented papers at the Brown Transatlantic Conference and the “A medio siglo de El siglo” conference in Havana, Cuba.
Guy Raffa received a Faculty Research Assignment and an ACLS fellowship to work on “Dante’s Bones and the Idea of Italy” in 2011-12. His latest book, The Complete Danteworlds: A Reader’s Guide to the “Divine Comedy,” went into its second printing with University of Chicago Press.
Elizabeth Richmond-Garza stepped down in the summer of 2011 as the Secretary-Treasurer of the American Comparative Literature Association after nine years of overseeing all financial, administrative and virtual activities of this 2,500-member international learned society. She presented papers at the annual meetings of both the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (“Nervous Attacks and Severed Heads: Intermediate Sexualities in Chekhov and Wilde”) and the ACLA (“Detecting the Dandiacal Body: A Century in Queer Profiles From London’s Sherlock Holmes to Moscow’s Erast Petrovich Fandorin”). Her essay, “The Double Life of Salomé: Sexuality, Nationalism and Self-Translation in Oscar Wilde,” was published in Refiguring Oscar Wilde’s Salomé,” Michael Y Bennett, ed. (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2011), and her foreword, “Lagniappe”, to the proceedings from the 2010 ACLA conference in New Orleans is forthcoming.
César A. Salgado read papers on Cuba’s Orígenes writers at the International Virgilio Piñera Centennial Conference, the VI Transatlantic Studies Conference at Brown, and the Latin American Studies Association 2012 Congress. He was invited to present a lecture titled “Lezama and Haiti: Locating the Caribbean in La expresión americana” at the University of Miami in March. He finished two articles forthcoming in critical collections, “Lezama y el Moncada: Figuras de la insurgencia en ‘Oppiano Licario’ y la exégesis viteriana” and “Nuevos hallazgos sobre Alejandro Tapia y Rivera en Cuba.” He collaborated on the critical edition of José Lezama Lima’s essays for Editorial Confluencias in Spain, and served as associate editor for the Gale Cengage Cuba encyclopedia, which made Library Journal’s 2011 Best Reference List. He blogged on Puerto Rican literature and historiography for the alternative online journal 80grados: http://www.80grados.net/author/cesar-a-salgado/. Page 18 www.utexas.edu/cola/progs/complit Spring 2012 News in Brief
Simone Sessolo received a University Continuing Fellowship and had an article accepted for publication in The Journal of Popular Culture. He also organized a panel and presented a paper at ACLA. Pending his dissertation defense in June, Simone accepted a Lectureship position in the Sweetland Center for Writing at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, starting Fall 2012.
Maryam Shariati presented papers at three conferences this year: 2011 MESA, 2012 ACLA, and 2012 Sequels Symposium. Her book review on Fatima El-Tayeb’s European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe was published in the Spring 2012 issue of The E3W Review of Books. She also authored an article on a modern Persian drama, Ja’far Khan Has Returned from the West, for Encyclopaedia Iranica. This summer, Maryam will continue teaching Persian as an extension instructor for the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at UT. She pre- sented “Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood” in the ACLA seminar “Children of Men: Childhood in narratives of Crisis and Catastrophe.”
Jayita Sinha participated in a panel on poetry in translation organized by TILTS, and presented her translations of two poems by a thirteenth-century Indian woman mystic, Muktabai. In April, Jayita presented a paper on the autobiography of Bahinabai, a seventeenth-century woman saint, at the Texas Asia Conference held at UT.
Tarek El-Ariss signed a contract for his first book,Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political, which will come out in March 2013 by Fordham University Press. He received a Postdoctoral Fellowship, Transregional Studien-EUME, Wissenschaftkolleg, Berlin, Germany (Fall/Spring/Summer). His project is enti- tlted: Making a Scene: Literature, Social Media, and the Arab Spring. It is the subject of his second book manu- script. He also received a Humanities Research Award from the College of Liberal Arts at UT Austin. He present- ed “Revealing the Hidden in European Arts: The Poetics of Aversion in Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq (1804-1886)” at the ACLA Conference and “Digital Activism: Arabic Literature and the New Political” at the MESA Conference. He delivered a talk at the City University of New York entitled, “Eating Rotten Meat Does not Disgust them: Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq (1804-1886) on British Food and Civilization.” He spoke at the “Making a Scene: Literature, Social Media, and the Arab Spring” Symposium at Queens College, delivering a talk entitled, “Protest Contagion: North Africa and the Middle East.” He spoke at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, giving a talk entitled, “The Poetics of Aversion in Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq’s Revealing the Hidden in Arts.”
Lynn Wilkinson published Anne Charlotte Leffler and Modernist Drama: True Women and New Women on the Fin-de-siècle Scandinavian Stage, and was awarded a three-year COLA Humanities Research Award, which will support research on her current book project on nineteenth-century women intellectuals. She also presented two conference papers: “Staging Morris: Anne Charlotte Leffler’s How to Do Good and William Morris’s Critique of Philanthropy” at a panel sponsored by the William Morris Society at the 2012 MLA and “Towards an Aesthetics of the Close-Up: Strindberg and Béla Balázs’s Visible Man” in the seminar series, “100 Years Later: Strindberg the Modern?,” at the 2012 ACLA.
Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski’s book Group Identity in the Renaissance World was published by Cambridge University Press last August. Her interview with Italian neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese, one of the discoverers of Mirror Neurons, was published in California Italian Studies 2.1 in December, together with an article co-au- thored with Gallese entitled “How Stories Make Us Feel: Toward an Embodied Narratology.” In December Dr. Wojciehowski received the President’s Associates Teaching Excellence Award. She was also promoted to Full Professor, effective in the fall of 2012.
Nat Zingg presented a paper entitled “Self-Consciousness and Psychological Crises in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King” at the GRACLS conference and published a review of Jeff Mapes’ Pedaling Revolution: How Cyclists are Changing American Cities in the E3W Review of Books.
Attention Alumni: The Newsletter welcomes contributions from alumni about any aspects of your post-UT Austin lives and careers. The newsletter’s goal is to celebrate the achievements of students and faculty currently in the program and at the same time to share important news about our alumni. It is your successes and undertakings which have secured us a national ranking of 21st in the country according to the National Research Council’s survey, and we would like the opportunity to congratulate you publicly. We encourage you to share your accomplishments with us. Please send your news for publication in the 2013 newsletter to the Program’s email address: [email protected]
Page 19 www.utexas.edu/cola/progs/complit Spring 2012 Fall 2011 CL Proseminar
CL Proseminar: Professional Strategies for Comparatists in Field Studies
Coordinated and moderated by Prof. César A. Salgado, CL Grad. Adviser
Aug 26 Welcome by Associate Dean for Research Esther Raizen Introduced by Program Chair, Prof. Elizabeth Richmond-Garza
Sept 2 Prof. Alex Wettlaufer (French and Italian, Associate Director Plan II Honors), “Current Challenges to Comparative Literature”
Sept 9 Prof. Lynn Wilkinson (Germanic Studies), “On Intellectuals”
Sept 16 Prof. Naomi Lindstrom (Spanish and Portuguese), “Current Issues in Latin American Jewish Studies”
Sept 23 Prof. Hanna Chapelle Wojciehowski (English), “Cognitive Cultural Studies”
Sept 30 Prof. David Kornhaber (English), “Comparative Literature and Theatre Studies”
Oct 7 Prof. Ivonne Chang (Asian Studies), “Theory in Asian Literary Studies”
Oct 14 Prof. Samer Ali (Middle Eastern Studies), “From the Journal of Arabic Literature”
Oct 21 Prof. Thomas Garza (Texas Language Center, Slavic and Eurasian Studies), “Applied Literature and Teaching Language and Culture”
Oct 28 Prof. Wayne Rebhorn (English), “New Historicism and Comparative Literature”
Nov 4 Prof. Jennifer Wilks (English), “Points of Comparison: Haiti in Hemispheric American Studies”
Nov 11 Prof. Daniela Bini (French and Italian), “Verdi, Woman, and Nation”
Nov 18 Prof. Michael Johnson (French and Italian), “New Issues in Archival Research for Literary Studies”
Dec 2 Prof. Katie Arens (Germanic Studies), “CL: The Research and Professional Communication Imperative”
We asked participants at the Fall 2011 proseminar to tailor their presentations so that dis- cussions of pragmatic issues of professionalization and academic “survival skills” specific to Comparative Literature were balanced with descriptions of current research in specialized comparative areas. The participants stepped up to the task and made it one of the most exciting proseminar experiences I’ve witnessed. I thank them for their work and for helping welcome and orient our new students through one of our program’s key features. Sincerely, César A. Salgado
Page 20 www.utexas.edu/cola/progs/complit Spring 2012 GRACLS Conference
The 9th Annual Graduate Conference in Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin Go-Betweens: Crossing Borders Friday, October 12th, and Saturday, October 13th Keynote Address by Dr. Jahan Ramazani The University of Virginia
The migrant and the adventure-seeker. The empire-builder and the exile. The diplomat, the blogger, and the stu- dent abroad. The go-between assumes a variety of identities but in each incarnation, this figure performs a vital role in cultural and literary studies. Translators and mediators of conflicting ideologies and languages, ‘go-betweens’ shatter our definitions of borders and boundaries. Through their movements, they invite us to explore space in radically new ways and to discover relationships among previously unconnected communities or people. As their presence becomes increasingly felt, critical theory has developed methods of interacting with their experiences. Conversations on cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, and planetarity all emerge from an understanding that a global world is not a homogenous one and that we as scholars have a responsibility, one that verges on an ethical obligation, to represent the multiplicity of experiences and identities that belong to each individual and place. The 9th Annual Graduate Conference in Comparative Literature embraces this challenge and asks participants to con- sider narratives by, about and for these border-crossing groups and individuals.
Proposals & Submission Information The conference welcomes proposals from individuals and panels alike. Submissions for the conference should consider critically theoretical frameworks such as cosmopolitanism, transnationalism and planetarity or should use these approaches in their literary or cultural analyses. In keeping with the conference theme, we especially encour- age the presentation of interdisciplinary or multilingual work.
Possible topics include: • Narratives of movement, such as letters from abroad, the pilgrimage account, or autobiographies of exile • Languages of between-ness, such as translation practices, creole/pidgin/dialects and code switching • The advent of techno-savvy go-betweens, such as hackers, Twitter revolutionaries, and cyber-chatters • Engagements with problematic borders, such as Mexico-U.S. crossings or the Ramallah wall • Forced migration, such as slavery, territorial conquests, or natural disasters • Geographical categories that accommodate in-between-ness, such as Hemispheric studies, the Black Atlantic, the Mediterranean and the Caribbean • Go-betweens in conflict zones, such as messengers, guides, imbedded journalists, defectors • The city as a space for the between: re-thinking the metropolis, the cosmopolitan • Gender as border: in-between queer and gender studies • The hybridity of genres, such as the blending of fiction and non-fiction, Twitter poetry, and new narrative strategies • The politicized go-between, such as participants in protest movements, financial crises and revolutions • (De) forming canons: new methods of teaching language, culture and literatures
Panel Proposals may include 3 or 4 speakers and must be submitted by August 24th, 2012. Each member of the panel must submit an individual abstract online at http://goo.gl/am4Kw. The panel leader should then email [email protected] with the proposed title, topic, moderator (if available) and presenters for the panel.
The deadline for Individual Abstracts is August 24th, 2012. All proposals should be submitted through our on- line application at http://goo.gl/am4Kw.For additional information about the conference, please contact conference organizers Katie Logan and Martino Lovato at [email protected] or visit UT’s Program in Comparative Literature website: http://www.utexas.edu/cola/progs/complit/
Page 21 www.utexas.edu/cola/progs/complit Spring 2012 Program in Comparative Literature Job Placement News The University of Texas at Austin Carlos Amador will work as a lecturer at the UT 1 University Station B5003 Austin Department of Spanish and Portuguese in Austin, Texas 78712-0196 2012-2013
Office: Calhoun Hall 217 Naminata Diabate was selected as a Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University.
Telephone 512.471.1925 Anna Katsneslon took two Adjunct Assistant Fax 512.471.8878 Professor positions at the Lander College for Women, Touro College and at Medgar Evers College, CUNY
Email Address: Lanie Millar will be Visiting Assistant Professor at [email protected] Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Oregon starting Fall 2012 Please visit our website: Johanna Sellman was appointed as a lecturer www.utexas.edu/cola/progs/complit in Comparative Studies at Ohio State University - Newark in Fall 2010.
Simone Sessolo accepted a Lectureship position in the Sweetland Center for Writing at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, starting Fall 2012. Comparative Literature Program Staff
Director Elizabeth Richmond-Garza
Graduate Adviser Attention Alumni: César A. Salgado The Program in Comparative Literature wel- Graduate Coordinator & comes contributions about any Newsletter Co-Editor aspects of your post-UT Austin lives and ca- reers. The newsletter’s goal is to Billy Fatzinger celebrate the achievements of students and faculty and share important news about our alumni.
It is your successes and undertakings which have made this such a strong program, and we would like the opportunity to congratulate you publicly.
Please send your news for publication in the 2013 newsletter to: